


Dinner with Trimalchio

by guckindieluft



Category: Original Work, The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Alternate Universe, Future Fic, M/M, Mystery, Original Character(s), Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-19
Updated: 2014-01-04
Packaged: 2017-12-27 01:20:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 19,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/972649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/guckindieluft/pseuds/guckindieluft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ralph and Laurie's copy of the Phaedrus finds an unexpected new life in Thatcher's Britain when two Classics lecturers decide to solve the mystery of its inscriptions.</p><p>This can also be read as original fiction; it is a mystery set some 40 years after the Charioteer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Clock in the Dining-Room

**Author's Note:**

> This can easily be read as a stand-alone; it takes place roughly 40 years after the original work. But since the few people who read this will be mostly Renault fans I just want to assure you, without spoiling anything, that tagged characters will play a major role.

 

> ‘Here,’ said he, ‘don’t you know who’s your host today? It’s Trimalchio—he’s terribly elegant…He has a clock in the dining-room and a trumpeter all dressed up to tell him how much longer he’s got to live.’
> 
> – The Satyricon, Patronius  
>   
>  ‘A queer party: something between a lonely hearts club and an amateur brothel. You expected that, didn’t you?’
> 
> –The Charioteer

 

**October 1989**

  
The foremost thing to occur to Laurie, when he woke, was that he couldn’t recall going to sleep in the first place. Normally this shouldn’t have bothered him overmuch--he dreamed deeply and convincingly, and was often muddled in the morning--but normally, his pillows didn’t snore. His duvet had also transmuted overnight into an alarming shade of avocado, and smelt of biscuits eaten in bed. Turning to the side where his ugly lamp and uglier bedside table should have been, he instead rolled nose-first into another face. An arm came up and down on him like a small tree falling, with all the unavoidable inevitability of an accident in motion, and there it was. Laurie felt surprisingly circumspect. ‘Hello there,’ he breathed, and the nose snuffled.  
  
Well, it was one way to solve the problem of his flat’s broken radiator. Laurie congratulated his former self for solid thinking and wondered where his trousers had gotten to. In his experience with these sorts of encounters, they didn’t mind if you nipped off first-- saves the trouble of wasting toast on you. Already, tepid yellow bars of light had slipped through the sides of the shades, by which he could make out the unfamiliar planes of a room jagged with the ephemera of a strange man’s life. He felt, as usual, vaguely hunted by the sunlight; he disliked the unforgiving reality that it brought, translating a darkness free of obligations or individuality to the particular, from a void that could have been anyone’s to one man’s dirty pants and pictures of home. It also meant he might be late to work.  
  
Laurie dug his arm free of the trench of limbs and waved it experimentally in the air. The foray allowed him to determine that the stranger, whoever he was, had his parents paying the heating, had a better job than a student flat would suggest, or usually charged for this sort of thing. Well, or his thermostat was at a perfectly normal temperature and he just didn’t have radiators older than his own mother and had the money to keep them all night. No point in waiting to find out. He was able to flounder delicately free of the strange arm and duvet and venture forth with barely a wince at the chill.  
  
He located his pants, trousers, vest, shirt and the rest at predictable intervals from the door, which meant he was as decent as could be hoped for by the time he arrived at the threshold and gave his back pockets an exploratory pat down. The bin, he noticed without surprise or enthusiasm, was back by the bed. Despite his best efforts to confirm its contents as quietly as possible, he was heavy on his feet with hangover and the strange man stirred.  
  
‘Bother,’ Laurie murmured mildly, as the man felt in vain for him, and after an ineffectual pat or two opened his eyes. The window of opportunity was too brief, and while it was one thing to leave while his lay was abed, it would be churlish to pull a runner right in his face. He managed at least two steps back from the bin for a casual lean against the desk, where he felt less keenly the dwindling background noise of fear and exposure. Laurie smiled winningly, past the hammering pulse in his jaw, into the stranger’s sleep-bleared eyes and said swiftly, ‘Sorry. Morning lecture. Can’t stay.’  
  
‘Lecture?’ the man echoed, then bounded shamelessly up to clutch at the clock. ‘It’s only half seven!’ he wheezed, falling back on the pillows with a solid whump. It wasn’t such a bad view.  
  
‘Yes,’ Laurie agreed, shifting his weight pointedly off the desk and making a show of re-checking his pockets.  
  
‘The earliest aren’t for an hour, and don’t only first years have those?’ His eyes flew open with resumed alarm. ‘You aren’t a first year?’  
  
‘God, no, do I look it?’ He knew he didn’t. He didn’t used to feel hangovers pulling at the skin of his face; didn’t used to feel so hunched from an unfamiliar mattress. ‘Just need to swing by mine for a wash and a change first.’  
             
‘Lecturer’s not going to be smelling you, Laurie.’  
             
Laurie was disconcerted by the use of his name, but rallied with a cheeky wink and a step backward. ‘Oh, I might have done already. Hope you aren’t reading a degree in Classics.’  
             
‘Physics,’ the stranger wondered. ‘Christ. Well, I won’t spread it round.’ Laurie seriously doubted that, but he had trouble caring past his perfectly resounding head-ache.  
             
‘Good. Well--’  
  
‘Here, you’ve forgotten something.’ The stranger reached around the other side of his decidedly less faux bedside table and fiddled with something. When Laurie reached to take it their fingers brushed; something about the callouses said musician and he wondered if he wasn’t getting his memory back. As he took the number, amused that the man had bothered, a clear vision of the jazz bar suddenly descended upon him, the man up front and Laurie with his usual retinue in the corner. Several vivid scenes in succession unravelled from there. He gleaned that it had been a good night, as these things went, and furthermore that this was going to be a very bad day.  
  
‘Ta.’ Laurie pocketed it with an absent smile; the scrap solved at least one problem: it had a number and over top the name Sean Dempsey. He wondered whether he’d been missed at the flat, or if they were too diverted building igloos to have caught on yet. Well, no helping the row to come. ‘See you round, then, Sean.’  
  
‘Hope so,’ Sean rejoined cheerfully, then added, suddenly serious--it looked absurd on him, Laurie thought madly, with his hair all stuck up like an experiment in static electricity gone horribly awry, and pillow marks like tiny crags through his cheek-- ‘And good luck at the funeral, Laurie. Sorry for your loss.’  
  
‘Cheers,’ Laurie murmured. He had nothing with which to beat back the terror.  
  
Outside again, Laurie got his bearings with disheartening little difficulty. He calculated his flat as being only three, perhaps four blocks away. Although he wasn’t precisely up for navigation with the state of head, and he fancied he reeked rather too appallingly to inflict on the public-transport population, a proper walk would have given him space to think. Unfortunately the distance was not so great from one Sean Dempsey, soon to be another pair of eyes to avoid meeting in the market line, no doubt, since the man had the gall to live in Laurie’s immediate neighbourhood. He seemed the sort to come over for a chat even if pointedly ignored for several weeks.  
  
Laurie couldn’t bring himself to care; the voice behind his eyes chanted _funeral, funeral, funeral_. The thought made him ill. More ill. Laurie couldn’t imagine feeling more ill, if a small creature took up permanent residence in his duodenum. He could taste remembered despair under soured cider and another man’s spit. Well—he expected he’d find out soon enough just how sick he could be. Funeral.  
  
The air was predictably heavy with damp, and as he shambled the few blocks back to his flat, Laurie could feel it working its way into his sinuses, laying down like a large wet dog on his headache. His stomach was launching a retaliatory assault, but he didn’t fancy being sick in any of the alleys or wynds along the way; more than likely he’d be walking through someone elses’ sick and piss or worse, so it was worth the briskest walk he could manage to make his way back. Another good argument against the bus, at least.  
  
The last stretch, with home in sight, was the most gruelling. Whoever had designed Laurie’s building had made some attempt to match it to its surroundings, which it did with unqualified success, inasmuch as it was grey. Flats like his were all constructed shortly after the war, and with no more discerning audience than single, half-mad and half-starved men, nobody had quite bothered to make sure they had any sort of visual appeal. The years had not been kind to it either, and the last paintjob--ten years or so ago judging by the colour--had rendered the lobby the precise shade of butternut squash. It made his stomach turn over sharply, and he redoubled his efforts, fumbling through his key fob as he went. Laurie made it up the overlit stairs and into his room without meeting anyone who would impede his progress towards the toilet, where he was immediately, blessedly wretched.  
  
As far as Laurie or anyone else could make out, the toilets were original to the building, and Laurie tugged unenthusiastically and ineffectually at the ceiling pull at least six times before the bowl gurgled and swirled a bit. From his position on the tacky linoleum, staring down at a stubborn soup of his own sick, Laurie wondered that he’d really felt it beneath himself to ask sober, self-possessed Sean Demsey whose funeral, precisely, he ought to be worried about this time.  
  
Deciding he could clean his teeth and hang on the chain at the same time--hell, it might even give him the necessary leverage to keep on his feet--Laurie looked within himself and concluded that if it were his mother, he would not have gone out on the pull. For one thing, he could hardly have kept his mother’s death to himself, and no one would have ever allowed it. One fewer thing to worry about. He could only dredge up a faint dismay on his mother’s behalf for his step-father’s passing, so on the other hand that would have been unlikely to send him round the bend. Radiating outwards to more distant relatives and friends, he was less sure of the exact calibration of each relationship, and guessing only made his stomach burn acid anxiety over a delicate membrane of precisely, at this point, nothing.  
  
Well, nothing for it, he’d have to venture out. Victoria could always be counted on to know things. It was one of her less appealing qualities.  
  
After a shower and shave, and something for his head.  
  
The shower was, as usual, colder than a march on Moscow, but Laurie remained determinedly rooted in place, willing away the unclean, oily spill he imaged just under his skin. The satisfaction of conquest had passed more quickly than usual today, necessarily. Now he had only an elusive sense of disgust and anxiety. The water was excoriating, the purifying falls of some Spartan ritual. He had an abstract and, he worried, soon-to-be-confirmed intuition that this was a deserved punishment. If so, the involved parties were unlikely to be mollified by the fact that he’d taken a longer than usual shower.  
  
The only medicine in the cabinet was stronger than he liked these days, but if he had to ask Victoria for pain-killers as well he’d start off several more notches beneath the moral high ground. As he was glumly resolving to suffer through it, the phone rang, interrupting his ruminations. Laurie clutched awkwardly at his towel as he stumbled for it, and wished he’d had the foresight to lower the shades.  
  
‘Laurie,’ his mother gasped immediately, and he was embarrassed by the rush of relief and nervousness that shot sharply up his fingers to his jaw. ‘Where have you been?’  
  
‘Asleep,’ he attempted, not entirely untruthfully, and ventured, ‘How are you holding up?’  
  
There was a long pause in which Laurie realised he’d set her off, and the minutes, silent but for the pointed hitches of her crying, stretched into a deepening paranoia he was sure would culminate in dry wretching what little dignity was left to him. ‘Mum?’ he prompted.  
  
‘I’m here, love,’ she huffed, which was not precisely an answer, and then again, was. ‘You’ll be taking the evening train, then, won’t you?’  
  
‘I,’ Laurie stalled. ‘I haven’t made it to the ticket office yet. It was shut last night. I’ll stop by after I’m done giving today’s lecture.’  
  
‘The funeral’s not until tomorrow, but it’d mean so much to your gran if you made it.’ She’d not yet composed herself enough for the lie not to show through the strain in her voice; his gran had, in fact, declared a very express interest in Laurie never setting foot in her house again. At least, she said, until his lifestyle showed marked signed of improvement. Given that she was on at least three different charity committees, had spent her working life as a ward nurse in a hospital of religious inclinations, and maintained a separate bedroom from his grandad, this was a standard he was unlikely to ever meet by half. Not that Laurie, who was accustomed to feeling inadequate and had never been close to her anyway, and had in fact feared her deeply as a child, had made a terrific effort to change his wayward ways.  
  
Including, naturally, his latest misadventure, which thus failed to constitute an excuse for failure to materialise at home when bidden. At least, with a sick lurch, he had pieced together for whom the funeral was. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can. Promise.’  
  
‘You’d better,’ his mother sniffed. ‘I’ll have your head, Laurie.’  
  
‘I mean it,’ he said, with feeling, which surprised her into calm. ‘I want to be. Look, mum, I’ve really got to head to work, but I’ll ring as soon as I’ve got my travel plans sorted. Promise.’  
  
‘Till later, then,’ his mother agreed weakly, and rang off. Laurie stood still for what felt like both a very long and a shamefully short time, clutching at his damp towel and humiliated that he did not have the decency to cry.  
  
Victoria’s presence in the mini-kitchen was hardly a comforting one. She sat at their small, scourged, rummaged table, directing a withering eye on him over the paper. ‘That’s some piss-poor beauty sleep you’re getting,’ she declared finally, and returned to the World section.  
  
‘Oh well. I don’t suppose you’re able to recommend a good beautician,’ he shot back, and was immediately sorry when the paper snapped tighter. ‘Sorry, Vic. Where’s Craig?’  
  
‘Work, I’d imagine. Shockingly, he didn’t wait up for you. Serves you right to take the bloody bus.’  
  
‘I’m sorry. Honestly, I am.’ He looked up from the counter where he was feebly and reluctantly buttering toast and ventured, ‘You know funerals bring up bad memories for me.’  
  
‘And what’s your excuse for the other times? Lunch bring up bad memories too? Hats? Umbrellas? For shame, Laurie. What an excuse. Craig is a mess.’  
  
‘I doubt that. And even so, it’s not my fault if Craig wants more than I have on offer.’  
  
‘Like some common bloody decency?’ Victoria threw the paper abruptly to the table. ‘Two years, Laurie.’  
  
‘I know.’ After one gullet-twisting bite, he decided the toast portended more illness. Laurie tossed it in the bin and leant heavily against the counter. ‘Look, I’m probably taking the train out this afternoon so apologies will have to wait until I’m back, alright?’  
  
Victoria’s head snapped up incredulously, assessed the red of his eyes, and came to an unflattering conclusion. ‘You pisshead. Craig’s picking you up after work. He’s already packed so you should get a bag together after you’re done with yours.’  
  
‘Craig? What? Why would he do that?’  
  
‘Sheer bloody masochism would be my guess.’ Perceiving his distress, Victoria abruptly changed tacks. ‘He got to know your grandad well in that summer he spent down at yours. Making sure you didn’t hurl yourself off a clock tower, I might add. He has just as much a right. And he offered to help before you went and pulled half the pub. I imagine he hasn’t retracted the offer, not because he expects you to remember it, but because he’s a decent human being.’  
  
‘Oh, Christ.’  
  
‘Yeah, just about the only man you haven’t fucked in the week.’ Victoria suppressed an involuntary smile at her own wit, or Laurie’s self-flagellating chagrin. ‘Shove off, you’ll miss the bus.’  
  
Riding which was punishment enough, but even as Laurie clung to a bar, his stomach climbing up and down his abdomen and throat, he wished all the regret added up to contrition.

_________

  
At half four precisely, Craig found Laurie glaring indecisively at his least disshevelled jumper and jacket.  
  
‘That jacket doesn’t fit you properly, remember?’ he intervened mildly. ‘Come on, quick like a bunny, long ride ahead of us.’  
  
‘My gran’ll have a fit, though,’ Laurie sighed, and slipped them both into a protective covering. ‘Might as well bring it along.’  
  
Craig shrugged expressively and scanned the room while Laurie wrestled the zipper on his travel bag and knotted on a scarf. ‘Christ, it’s eerie in here, Laurie. You planning on opening a kidney harvesting ward?’  
  
Laurie cast about like a lost child. ‘What? Oh. I just had a tidy after lecture.’  
  
‘I’ve seen less “tidy” on a spaceship.’  
  
Laurie stumbled a bit under the unexpected weight of his bag, which he liked to put down to the quantity of Latin textbooks therein and not any personal qualities. ‘Is that what they’re known for? You seen many spaceships lately?’  
  
For this, he received only an enigmatic smile, followed by the back of Craig’s Brillo-textured head. ‘Oh aye, one came by just last night. Must have been when you weren’t in.’  
  
The opening was bitter but merciful. Nevertheless Craig did not turn around when Laurie rested a hand carefully on his shoulder. He wasn’t given to violence, but any man, provoked too many times, will break eventually. Laurie wished Craig would and was almost sad, when, again, Craig went still and thoughtful under his touch; he wanted only to be told his behaviour was too much, that it was beyond redeeming, this time, so he could finally rest. ‘I’m sorry I...I’m sorry I’m not around much.’ Craig slipped wordlessly away.  
  
They made their way down the stairs, sticky with the last of the weekend’s wine, in silence. Regret thrashed heavily in his stomach. God knew there wasn’t anything else left in there; Laurie hadn’t managed lunch or tea, either, and had begun to feel dizzy and unreal.  
  
Craig’s car, at least, was unforgivingly solid; the five hours ahead of them stretched mockingly. He settled himself into what he hoped would be the steadiest position, although with Craig’s driving, there were few positions that didn’t have the feeling of an aeronautics training exercise.  
  
His driving itself was dangerously absent-minded, but Craig always made a show of fiddling his environment before he started: checking his glove compartment, shuffling through the  bric-a-brac next to his seat as if he were looking for something and abruptly giving up, counting out toll change and securing the inevitable mid-drive snacks where the apples would not become projectile weapons. The last of the late autumn sun stained his skin with a print of Van Gogh’s haystacks, and when he finally directed his scrutiny to his passenger, the last bit of check-up on the pre-driving itinerary, his eyes were blanched to a soft toffee yellow. Laurie stared up at him, afraid, and Craig simply said, ‘You numpty,’ and pressed his palm to Laurie’s knuckles, hard. Just as quickly his hand was gone and he was backshifting dangerously into the afternoon rush traffic.  
  
Their lurching progress through the city posed a significant challenge to Laurie’s stomach. Luckily between the position of their neighbourhood--cheap and new, far from the tiered dignity of the city centre--and Craig’s blithely maniac driving, this leg of the journey didn’t last long. Craig had learnt to drive in the mountains and handled the car both as if he were surprised by the existence of other drivers, and expected the tarmac might end in oblivion at any moment.  
  
They passed the time in silence. Laurie found that he was painfully tired under the hangover. A vision of himself, navigating the impossible metal intestines of the train station, brought his exhaustion to life under his skin. He felt a sudden rush of grateful affection for Craig, and found he couldn’t even be annoyed when the car skidded to a narrow stop at an intersection, sending his stomach tumbling dangerously up towards his mouth. Barely a flicker crossed Craig’s face as a cab driver saluted him, shouting, passing through the other direction. Laurie snickered to himself, and found the smile difficult to press down again with Craig flicked a neutrally curious look in his direction and grinned innocently in response, clearly unaware of what he’d done to please Laurie but glad that he had done it.  
  
He settled down to watch the sunset pass through Craig’s hair as they drove through the countryside. Craig had not been an attractive child. Laurie had seen pictures. He was unnaturally tall and aggressively ginger. Then there was the extreme break in his nose--earned, he’d told Laurie one lazy morning, when he attempted to race a sister up a craggy hill and instead tumbled back down and into a local landmark (a glacial rock shaped like a reclining chair, said to have belonged to an ancient giant with too many sounds in his name for Laurie to manage). If that were not bad enough, he was also badly afflicted by freckles. But if Craig’s face took any more torture, it was not from the landscape, but children, who were, in the end, far crueller and more unyielding. By adulthood, most other men had nearly caught up to his height, not unnatural after all but merely very premature. The freckles had faded under the tender ministrations of cloistered acadaemia. His mangled nose was nearly roguish, particularly in their crowd, where none of them made much a habit of fist-fighting. But whatever brief, unflattering revelation of self-awareness he’d had at sixteen had long since succumbed again to his characteristic unselfconsciousness. So he retained, like archaeological imprints, an apologetic awkwardness--as well as the undaunted red hair.    
  
Laurie licked his dry lips, and ventured apologetically, ‘So, a Greek bloke walks into a tailor’s shop with a pair of trousers.’  
  
Craig spared him a glance. ‘Yeah?’  
  
‘The tailor takes the trousers and looks them over, you know, and says to the man, “Euripides?” The man replies, “Eumenides?’”  
  
Craig dimpled, eyes searching the blue twilight thoughtfully. ‘A verb comes up to this noun in a bar, yeah? And the verb says, “Hey baby, want to conjugate?” To which he replies: “I’m a noun, sir! I decline!’”  
  
‘I decline,’ Laurie echoed, laughing. ‘Oh, God.’  
  
‘Awful, yeah? My students thought so, too.’  
  
‘You didn’t!’  
  
Craig looked more deliberately over at Laurie and laughed. ‘You should see your face! Of course I did. You’re too spoilt by your little prigs. Sixteen-year-olds don’t exactly hop for joy on their way to Latin. I have to check that they’re awake somehow.’  
  
‘They aren’t exactly holding parades in my honour at the university, either.’ Laurie scratched absently at his nose. ‘This morning I gave them an unseen reading and I thought they might use the papers to slice me up like cold meats. Speaking of, did you bring along anything to eat?’ He smiled at Craig’s faint murmur of disgust.  
  
‘Apples and HobNobs on the back seat. And that’s because you’re no fun. I had my little rotters put on a musical version of _The Aeneid_ this week. You know, pop songs modified to task. Barnes, I’ve mentioned him, he’s the one who thinks he’s heard aliens on his ham radio, had Dido do “Never Gonna Give you Up,” it was brilliant.  They mocked up some battles with paper towel-rolls. Broke my lectern, unfortunately. The headmaster was aghast.’  
  
‘You are the devil’s own handmaiden, Craig.’ Fortunately, his fumbling in the back covered up any involuntary smiling he might have done.  
  
‘Come off it, they all love me. Even the headmaster. At least my kids come to class, which is a bloody miracle at that hellhole.’  
  
‘Well, some of us have to mark our students’ projects based on more than the fact that the glass steams up if you hold a mirror to their face.’  
  
Craig held out his hand for an apple. ‘Oh, I bet they could come up with some creative translations for you. “I do not love thee, Dr Raynes; for Latin gives me stomach pains—”’ He stalled out, frowning in concentration.  
  
“‘I really wish he’d take the trains?, I do not love thee, Dr Raynes?’” Laurie offered, as blasé as he could manage with HobNob crumbling down the front of his jumper.    
  
‘Laurie,’ Craig sighed, as disgusted as Craig could ever manage to be.  
  
‘Look—’  
  
‘If I’d known you were still five, I wouldnae have brought biscuits along. Please don’t make a mess of my car.’ Laurie self-consciously picked at the crumbs and thumbed them to his mouth, lint and all, grateful for Craig’s apparently endless generosity. He settled cautiously down to the sound of his friend describing the rest of his pop charts musical _Aeniad_ , finally falling asleep to the sound of his singing ‘And we can build this Rome together, stand this fate forever, nothing’s going to stop us now.’  
_  
  
Laurie sleepily allowed himself to be hugged and petted over when they arrived that night, patting absently at his mother’s back and nodding vaguely when it felt appropriate. Craig hung back, ostensibly rummaging for their bags, but Laurie knew he was only trying to give him space. And to put off the inevitable: Craig was fanatically allergic to conflict.  
  
His mother steered him into the yellow light of the house, tutting wetly. ‘Oh, Laurie, dear. You look like you’ve been through the wars!’  
  
‘Just a long night. You know,’ he said guiltily, and let her think he was up all night mourning, as she clearly had done.  
  
‘You shouldn’t have been on the road like that, Laurie. I couldn’t have borne it if you’d had an accident.’  
  
‘I didn’t,’ he said. ‘Craig drove me. You know I haven’t got a license.’  
  
‘Craig,’ she echoed, with just a flicker of something.  
  
‘That’s me,’ he said sheepishly, at the door. ‘Hello again, Dianne. I’m so sorry for your loss. He was like family to me.’ He clasped her hand gingerly and seemed reassured when she allowed it. ‘Er, where should these bags go?’  
  
‘Well...’  
  
‘My old room,’ Laurie put in, challengingly. ‘Unless someone else is using it?’  
  
‘No, Laurie, of course not, but—’  
  
‘Don’t fret so, I’ll sleep on the floor,’ Laurie declared. ‘Go on, Craig. You know where it is. I’ll put the kettle on.’  
  
‘Right.’ Craig wavered indecisively for a beat, and finally launched himself up the old, crying stairs like Dianne’s eyes were chasing him.  
  
Laurie’s grandmother was in the kitchen, clutching at her own tea, looking less bereaved than put out. She allowed him to do his own show of embracing and murmuring indistinct sad things for only a half minute before demanding to know what had taken him so long. He felt rather than saw his mother hovering nervously in the background.  
  
‘I couldn’t cancel my morning lecture,’ he said patiently, knowing his mother must have already conveyed his information, and it had already been found unsatisfactory. ‘I’m so sorry, I came as soon as I could. Craig drove me,’ he added, wanting that out of the way before the man himself returned.    
  
‘Who?’  
  
‘Williams? My, my old uni friend, you remember him. The Scottish one. He stayed here for the summer vac, once. He found me again when he came up to do his postgrad.’  
  
‘How fortuitous,’ his gran intoned. She looked as if she found it about as fortuitous as a kick to the head.  
  
‘Laurie,’ he mother interrupted, anxiously, ‘why don’t you head straight up to bed? You must be exhausted. We can talk in the morning. Your grandmother and I don’t want to keep you.’  
  
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Yes, I am.’  
  
‘There are extra linens in the hall closet,’ she fretted, ushering him out of the room before his grandmother could release whatever volley was building up beneath her skin. ‘Your aunt and uncle are in the spare, they’ll be in later.’  
  
‘Right. Yeah. Good night,’ he called over his shoulder, and turned back just in time to collide with Craig coming down the stairs in the opposite direction.  
  
‘Ow.’ Craig rubbed at his forehead dramatically, but allowed himself to be redirected back up the stairs, Laurie hissing ‘Up, up, up,’ on his heels. ‘Gran’s here,’ he explained shortly. He detoured to the toilet and was unsurprised to find that Craig had already neatly laid out their travel bags there.  Laurie cleaned his teeth savagely, aware of Craig watching him in the mirror and taking a far more measured approach to the task. ‘Christ,’ he gurgled, spitting foam and blood into the sink, ‘Felt like something died in my mouth today.’ On his way out he pulled blankets indiscriminately from the hall closet and slammed the door theatrically, and then again to his own room, shucking his trousers off on the floor as he walked.  
  
Craig followed quietly behind, watching as Laurie kicked the quilts into a vaguely rectangular formation on the floor. ‘Bloody hell, Laurie, let me,’ he murmured eventually, moving to a crouch outside the range of Laurie’s flailing feet.  
  
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Laurie bit out, suddenly deflated.  
  
‘You’re no taking the floor, Laurie,’ Craig soothed. ‘It’s fine.’  
  
‘After you drive me all this way, after I—’ Laurie sat down on the bed, hard. ‘We both know, Craig. Don’t bother.’  
  
‘We do?’  
  
Laurie pinched his lips in a thin pantomime of defiance, feeling awkward and at sea. ‘I’m not asking to, to...’  
  
‘You shouldn’t be.’ Craig’s voice was uncharacteristically firm. He gave him a long, assessing look from under the wiry mound of copper springs. ‘But you can say it, if you want comforting. I’m sad about it, too, you know.’ Laurie stared at him helplessly, and after a moment Craig rearranged the blankets into something more closely resembling a pallet, and got the light and the lock on the door himself. Laurie let Craig tug him down towards the pillow and arrange them into a warm, awkward tangle in the narrow bed.  
  
‘I think he was okay with me, you know,’ Laurie murmured finally into the darkness, eyes screwed together against his friend’s chest. ‘Well, the both of us.’  
  
‘I know,’ Craig whispered, and after a long, restless pause began humming something loose and unfamiliar into the darkness.  
  
\------------  
  
‘Andrew Raynes was a good man,’ a man Laurie recognised as a neighbour began, breaking the silence. Laurie tried to hide his startled jerk and guiltily attempted to follow what the man was saying. Earlier, he had moved to speak himself, with a broken and inarticulate story about their walks through the woods through his childhood, concluding lamely, ‘My grandfather had more love than anyone I’ve ever known,’ and not realising it was true until he said it. The stillness that followed resounded.  
  
The burial left him enervated and shaky. Later, at tea, Laurie allowed himself to be petted over by more kindly neighbours and force-fed their desserts. Not all of them wore funeral clothes; as a rule, Quakers didn’t, but he found it unnerving that this might have been any other potluck.  
  
Just when he thought his jaw might never unclench again, Craig appeared at his elbow, cleverly wielding a half-picked-over casserole to discourage offers of anything more. “Laurie,” he whispered, just barely this side of too close, “A centurian walks into a bar and asks for a Martinus. The barman says, ‘Don’t you mean a Martini?’ The centurion replies, ‘No- if I wanted a double, I’d have asked for one!’”  
  
Laurie’s mouth twitched into a smile. ‘You’re going to hell, Williams.’  
  
‘Luckily for me, there isnae any Quaker hell.’  
  
Laurie bit off any unnecessary lecture on the nature of Quaker beliefs and settled for, ‘You’re not Quaker, Craig.’  
  
‘Could be,’ Craig considered conversationally. ‘Presbyterians have some very unsettling attitudes toward smiling.’  
  
‘Oh, please, you—‘

  
‘Dianne!’ Craig interrupted, a bit too loudly. ‘Dianne, I didn’t get to tell you properly last night, thank you for your hospitality. It really means worlds to me to be here. I didn’t know him for long, but Grandpa Andy was really the grandda I never had.’  
  
Laurie’s mother nodded stiffly, looking too stricken to be disapproving. ‘Thank you, Craig. Oh, Laurie, I’ve been looking for you. The will hasn’t been read, yet, of course, but there were some things your grandfather set aside specially before he died.’  
  
She shook her head blankly at Laurie’s quizzical look and handed over a green paper bag, obviously reused from an earlier holiday or birthday. His grandmother’s doing. The book inside, however, was something that ran quite contrary to his grandmother’s neatly ordered world: battered, mangled and unrecognisable from the outside cover, which was darkened by a distinctly discomfiting stain.    
  
‘It’s just an old Fowler _Phaedrus_ ,’ Laurie frowned, disappointed, flipping through the middle pages. ‘You know, one of those stuffy old translations. It’s not much use to me. I’m focussing on Latin, and if I did anything with _Phaedrus_ , it’d have to be in the Greek, anyway. I wonder what he was thinking?’  
             
His mother’s smile was distant. ‘He hadn’t your education, Laurie. He probably thought he was doing a nice thing for you.’  
  
‘What’ve you got there?’ Craig asked from over his shoulder, breaking the tension. ‘Och, Laurie, that’s mingin’. What in the world?’ He reached round to flip experimentally at the front cover. ‘Is that blood? It goes right though.’ Suddenly conscious of Laurie’s mother, Craig recoiled his arm.  
  
‘Sorry, Mrs Raynes,’ he said at the same time as Laurie insisted, ‘Holy- Mum.’  
             
‘What?’ her eyes left off scrutinising Craig to where Laurie had proffered the open book, thumb planted emphatically on the inside cover.  
             
‘Oh,’ she gasped, clearly at a loss.  
  
‘Laurie Odell. Is that who I was named for?’  
  
‘There couldn’t be that many Lauries running around,’ Craig put in unhelpfully. Dianne deigned to ignore him.  
  
‘Your grandfather never would say, other than it was a friend from the war. You know he didn’t like talking about any of that. He simply insisted on the name and I was always so desperate to please him at that age, so that’s as much as we ever got of it. I had the idea he died, though.’  
  
‘I should say,’ Craig exclaimed, with a significant look at the gore-warped cover.  
  
‘No.’ Laurie ran his fingers gently over the blurred names. ‘At least, this didn’t kill him. He can’t have died and then dedicated the book to grandad.’    
  
‘Not unless he developed some infection later on. Your grandad did work in a hospital of some kind, and it was the 40’s. It had to have been fifty different kinds of unsanitary.’  
  
Laurie made a soft, agreeable sound. ‘But if you were dying of infection in a military hospital, what in the world would possess you to give a friend the _Phaedrus_? It’s not exactly typical leisure reading.’ 

‘I happen to find the _Phaedrus_ incredibly relaxing,’ Craig quipped, but his voice was unnaturally high. ‘That’s the one about the charioteers manfully wrassling their horses, right? Your kind of thing, eh Laurie?’ 

Dianne took this as her cue to potter off in an air of vague disapproval, but she squeezed Laurie’s arm gently as she went by. When they were alone again in the crowd, Laurie murmured down at the cover, ‘You know which one it is, Craig.’

Craig _hmm_ ed softly and ran his finger over the dedication. ‘Might just be his way of saying, you know, he loved you as you were and all that.’

‘Could be.’ Laurie glanced up, something like curiosity scratching its way out of the sick feeling in his stomach. He was surprised to realise he was smiling. ‘Worth looking into, though, don’t you think?’ 


	2. Dunkirk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I added a time tag to the first chapter. It takes place in October 1989.

> They were specialists. They had not merely accepted their limitations, as Laurie was ready to accept his, loyal to his humanity if not his sex, and bringing an extra humility to the hard study of human experience. They had identified themselves with their limitations; they were making a career of them. They had turned from all other reality, and curled up in them smugly, as in a womb.  
>  -The Charioteer, Mary Renault
> 
> Abiit ad plures.  
>  -The Satyricon, Petronius

**June 1987**

For Laurie, moving was a kind of mourning. After he was graduated from university he returned, prodigal triumphant, to a summer as dark and damp as the underside of an upturned rock. He felt out-of-place and spotlit in the castoffs he’d carefully scrounged from Oxford charity shops, caught in a suffocating paradox: better-educated, but useless to any local industry; stupid with ideals. He wasn’t the only one unemployed, but he wasn’t welcome in the pubs full of the neighbourhood lads and their fathers, men whose lives were broken with their union, their futures closed with the mines and the mills. Despite or perhaps because of his grandad’s history with them, the unionmen were uninterested in Laurie’s too-articulate sympathies. In a shift that seemed to have less to do with his participation in the rowing team than with some sort of cack-handed symbolism, he found that his old clothes didn’t fit at all. He took to staying indoors with his family, hemmed in by the eerie, endless rain.

Laurie’s grandmother took his unemployment as a sign that the Lord wanted him to commit to volunteering full-time. With patient grace she allowed him two days to sleep and mourn, one eye to the look of his face and the set of his shoulders that somehow told her that he already felt a very long way away from something that only days ago had seemed to be a bright, all-encompassing reality. At half six on the third day she bundled Laurie into her tiny, ancient Ford Anglia with his grandad and set them both to work and it somehow felt entirely correct, a grey place he knew in his bones. Since his earliest memories the hospital had formed the fifth point in the small star that had defined his most basic development: his house and his grandparents’ at opposite ends of the same neat little terrace; the meeting house and Friends’ school; the hospital, somehow the looming summation of all the others combined. He had thought that Oxford would clear the slate and form a new point at his centre, but it seemed to slide away from him irresistibly while he settled too easily into the familiar lines of the hospital’s broad shadow.

Laurie shouldn’t have been surprised by the power the hospital held over him. At sixty-two, his gran was head ward nurse and had been for as long as most of the other staff could remember. Despite the department’s best efforts to see her retired, she carried on with a invincible combination of indomitable will and irreproachable work. Assuming she ever succumbed to any of the disadvantages of age and didn’t simply become compact, hard, and timeless as a neutron star, as it sometimes seemed likely that she would, Laurie’s mother seemed likely to succeed her, heir to her tyrannical compassion. In Laurie’s mid-teens Diana had collected his future step-father from the hospital as quietly and neatly as she did the shopping; and though he was a surgeon he was also a lapsed member of the C of E and lacked any kind of moral or political conviction whatsoever, and was easily imprinted with family’s principles like some kind of blank-eyed bas-relief sculpture. In Laurie’s mind he haunted the halls of the A&E, stitching factory injuries like a vessel full of nothing but the hospital’s will. He was the kind of middle-class Oxbridge detritus who had gone into medicine vaguely thinking it would give him a sense of purpose, but who was too shallow to realise that the hospital would digest him into little more than a finely-honed tool. The fact grandad Andrew had, in fact, retired from his own job as a union representative had ultimately made little difference and he too had been sucked back into its work as if he’d never left medicine in the intervening years. Every other day Laurie’s gran carted his grandad along with her and abandoned him to the goodwill of the candy stripers. He took the opportunity to be useful and he was, with a patient serenity and friendly competence that had transformed him gradually into a strange amalgam of a guardian angel, Father Christmas, and a TV vicar all at once to the troubled hospital ecosystem.

But Laurie felt completely at sea. His grandmother wouldn’t suffer him to potter from room to room, chatting with patients like his grandad did; as a ‘strong young lad’ it was his duty to lift more than spirits. Several of the nurses and candy stripers were aggressively eager to help him find his place, but their attention only made Laurie feel anxious and secretive. Under his grandmother’s aegis and in the sunless halls of the hospital, papered over with posters and health notices insinuating in cheerful acronyms all the many ways he might destroy himself and his society, Laurie felt strangely like a spy in a foreign land, closed in on either side by propaganda and welcome.

Still, after four years of reading Græco-Roman philosophy he had to concede that the results were refreshingly tangible. He delivered flowers and paperwork, not orations and readings. The technical vocabulary was a familiar pick-n-mix of Greek and Latin: instead of looking for catachresis, amphibrachs, and hysteron-proteron, he searched out insulin, amoxicillan, and paracetamol—and found them easily, in the supplies closet. Moment by moment the hospital played out stark, clean demonstrations of cause and effect, right and wrong, excess and insufficiency.

Nevertheless, if his gran intended his indenture as an object lesson in the tangible pleasures of making a real and physical difference in the world, it was not entirely successful. He lacked the family instinct for healing and the work he could do was mechanical; within the week he had a good idea of what was expected of him. He found himself setting the things he saw and did against the bodily meditations of Socrates, Plato, Epicurus, Galen, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius. He recited Latin subjunctive verb conjugations as he emptied bed-pans. His jaw felt gluey and strange.

Nine days in he discovered a small garden behind the side exit to A&E with a bench that couldn’t be seen from the door and started taking his lunches there.

He’d only just begun to relax on his third day of hiding out when someone collapsed onto the other side of the bench. He glanced over, aggrieved, and was surprised to see a man about his own age. He was small inside the layers of flannel and leather, a great feathered plume of dark hair sticking up at odd angles, and he was trying to juggle a pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of his jacket and swap them for a stapled bag from the pharmacy. When he noticed Laurie watching his eyebrows ratcheted up sharply and he gestured with the cigarettes.

‘What, do you fancy one?’ His eyebrows disappeared entirely into the uneven broom of hair, and in their absence his eyes were dark sinkholes in the pale, jagged desert of his face.

‘Uh,’ Laurie startled, disproportionately embarrassed. ‘No, thanks. Don’t smoke,’ he added inanely.

The man shrugged, one spasmodic uptick of his shoulder. ‘Probably better anyway. Everything I’ve touched is one big toxic zone. Got this ‘flu I can’t shake, it’s fucking awful. Pardon me, sorry.’ He didn’t look the least bit sorry, just impishly pleased. ‘Don’t look so stricken, it’s not actually catching anymore. Don’t you work at hospital?’

‘Sorry, I just started. I’m only volunteering—don’t really have the hang of anything yet.’

The man glanced cannily at the exit and grinned. ‘Hiding, are you?’

Laurie caught his conspiratorial smile and hunched forward in mock-guilt. ‘Got it in one.’

‘I would, too, if I were you. Fucking awful place. Reeks.’ He flicked on a Zippo and took a long, contemplative drag of the cigarette. ‘I’d not stay there a minute longer than I had to if my doctor were David-fucking-Bowie.’

‘Don’t know if David Bowie would provide top care, anyway. Though I’d risk it, personally.’

His companion flicked the Zippo on and off in a studied fidget; it was engraved with an ostentatious λ, and he seemed to catch the flicker of recognition that skittered involuntarily across Laurie’s face, and smiled. ‘True, I’d probably be so overcome in the moment I’d go stupid with awe.’

Something in the lazy sprawl of the stranger’s attention put Laurie in a relaxed, confessional mood. ‘I haven’t got a choice either way. My gran’s head ward nurse. As long as I’m unemployed she gets the final say. She has the entire family working under her, more or less.’

‘Must be a right old battle-ax.’

Laurie scuffed guiltily at the mulch. ‘She’s just terribly high-minded.’

The man swung his feet up, birdlike, onto the bench and gave him a long, considering look. ‘Just graduated? Back living with your parents?’ Laurie nodded. ‘Well, she didn’t give that long, did she? I suppose your degree isn’t in medicine then.’

‘I came over all contrary and read Classics at Oxford,’ he admitted, feeling strangely ashamed. ‘So I could come back here anyway and be qualified to work as an orderly. Pretty stupid way to say “fuck you” in retrospect.’ He thrust his fingers up in a lazy V and after a pause diverted them to mime jabbing his own eyes out.

The man laughed hugely, ending it on a whooping coughing fit. He grimaced and stubbed out the cigarette on the bench, tossing it carelessly into the bushes. ‘Don’t have to justify yourself to me, mate. I work at a record store, I’m not exactly Captain Career Boy.’ He hunched deeper into his coat. The longer he was outside, the better Laurie could see the vivid twin streaks of fever blush on his cheeks. ‘So you’re pissing away your best years here, free at last from the yoke of education, no job, no rent, no—wait, have you got a girl friend?’

‘Never have,’ Laurie confirmed lightly, and the man’s smile turned smug.

‘A fit lad like you? I don’t believe it.’ He paused wickedly. ‘I’m Tom. Tell you what—’

‘Laurie.’

‘—Laurie. That looks like my bus. ‘Flu notwithstanding, I’ve got to go back to my own job, but if you happen to find yourself near the records shop down Merchant Street, you might catch me, eh? I clock off round eight, you’d be welcome to join my mates and me down the pub.’ He swung down into Laurie’s personal space as he stood, grinning widely. ‘That is, if your gran’ll allow it.’

‘The cheek,’ Laurie gasped in mock-offense, and Tom’s back laughed at him as he climbed into the bus.

*********

The records shop was a narrow storefront in a brick-front building crammed into the old terrace like a curious bystander. Its windows were papered over in a double layer of posters for releases and records spanning the past five years, and the sign in the door was flipped to CLOSED, but when Laurie tried the door it shrieked open. The shop was long and claustrophobic, the floor a treacherously thin, damp-smelling industrial pile carpet.

‘Laurie!’ Tom cried, flinging himself out of the darkness at the back of the room and halfway over the register. ‘You came!’

Laurie tugged self-consciously at his sleeves. ‘I wouldn’t get too excited. I’m pretty boring.’

Tom was knelt under the counter, rummaging for something, and his voice came to Laurie as a muffled echo. ‘Sorry, who says that’s a problem? Worst-case scenario, you just sit there and look gorgeous.’ He emerged like a jack-in-the-box, brandishing a flask which went into his back pocket. ‘What’s it like outside?’

‘Worse than earlier. Lows teens, and it’s spitting as a bonus.’

‘Fantastic. Perfect drinking conditions! Nobody will be insisting we do something awful like “take advantage of the nice weather” and waste time watching the sunset or some bollocks like that.’

Laurie tracked Tom’s mad, sweeping gestures as he swung into his leather jacket and heaved a messenger bag across his shoulder. He lacked any kind of economy of movement, and every step he took toward Laurie seemed to have an odd bounce and sway, as if he propelled himself forward by pushing himself off on his toes like a diver endlessly seeking the water. Laurie cleared his throat. ‘Feeling any better?’

‘Oh, loads, I don’t know why I didn’t go to hospital sooner.’ He swayed familiarly into Laurie’s side and clutched at his elbow. He smellt of leather, and cigarette smoke, and cologne he oughtn’t’ve been able to afford, and Laurie could practically see the thick scent soaking into the wool of his jumper. He could clearly imagine the look his mother would give him when it finally made its way into the wash. ‘Of course, lucky I did when I did, huh lovely? I’m so bloody tired though, do you think they might have accidentally mixed in some sleeping pills? Is that the kind of thing that happens there a lot?’

‘I should hope this isn’t you on sleeping pills. I’d hate to see what you’re like normally.’

Tom smacked his arm and hauled him, tripping, out the front door. ‘Darling, you have no idea. Come on, then, you’ve clearly been spending too much time ‘round boring old pensioners. I feel like a charity worker, I really do.’

‘It’s good to know we have hobbies in common,’ Laurie agreed philosophically, and Tom hooted his appreciation.

‘Two hobbies,’ Tom amended. ‘Charity work and being bloody gorgeous. Should give us plenty of things to talk about, eh?’ He drew to an abrupt stop on the street corner. ‘So I may have lied a bit. We’re going round the pub later, but we were planning on starting out at mine if that doesn’t bother you.’

‘Should I be concerned you’re luring me into a kidney harvesting scheme?’

‘Sadly I simply swoon at the sight of blood, so that’s right out as a way to supplement my income. Too bad, I know.’

‘In that case I don’t see why not.’

Tom grinned and pulled Laurie sharply around the corner. ‘Come on then, we’ve just got to stop by the offie and pick up something.’ He hopped over the threshold of another narrow shop, singing ‘Hiyya Chuck! What do you fancy, then, Laurie?’

Laurie shifted uncomfortably under the unamused glower of the thickset, sallow proprietor. ‘Er. Doesn’t matter.’

Tom hummed as if Laurie had contributed something very meaningful and surveyed the cheap liquors with the air of a connoisseur. ‘Grouse or vodka? I’ve got some squash at home.’

‘Both? I can get one.’

Tom grabbed the second-cheapest vodka with a flourish and passed it over, beaming. ‘Here you go, you flirt.’ He smacked the bottle of Grouse down on the counter and turned his bright attention on the unresponsive owner. ‘That’s all for me, Chuck. How’s the kiddies? Good? Lovely. Can you believe the Council’s had this road blocked up for two weeks now? Are they filling it in with solid gold, farted out the arse of angels? Has it been bad for business?’ He kept up a steady stream of friendly chatter til the door swung shut behind them, and paused only briefly to manhandle the bottles into his satchel before concluding, ‘God, he hates me! He wouldn’t have me in if I weren’t single-handedly keeping his kids in shoes. Silly bastard.’

Tom’s opinions filled the walk across town, through the narrowing roads to a leaning, un-renovated terrace which leaked the crackle of competing radios and televisions. Tom’s flat was below street level, down slippery old stone steps. Two fat men in vests were sat angled out the windows of the first floor flat, smoking and staring with twin looks of hostile indifference, tapping out a steady drizzle of ash. The ground floor housed a charity shop, which, though locked and dark, seemed still to breathe out the strange mingled stench of a hundred discarded fragments of unknown lives. A long polyester dress stood limp sentry next to a tatty trench coat in the window, its broad floral pattern swampy in the yolky street-light. Laurie felt the manikins’ presence hovering above him as Tom wrestled his key into the door. The door finally lurched inward and Tom pitched forward over the threshold, cursing and giggling. Laurie followed close behind.

The room on the other side couldn’t have contained more than a dozen people but it was packed to the gills and muddy with a garbled mixture of noisy conversation and a record player tinnily scratching out something with a lot of synthesizer. It wasn’t much warmer inside the flat than out, but Tom nevertheless flung his leather jacket over a stuffed chair with a smirking air of ritual. The man currently occupying the chair turned and glowered, but Tom only leant forward and pecked him on either cheek. ‘Hi hi! Party’s here!’

‘Did you go to see a doctor like I said?’ the man asked, unmoved by Tom’s energy.

‘Yes, yes, _mother_. They stole my blood and everything, not that it did me any good. Doctor said antibiotics don’t work on ‘flu so all I got was some stupid cough medicine. Fortunately for you it wasn’t a totally wasted trip. Roland, this is Laurie. I met him this morning and he’s agreed to grace us with his good looks for the evening. Say hi Roland.’

‘Christ, Tommy, only you could pull someone at the A&E.’

‘Aw cheers mate. Truly flattered. Hey, where’s Greg? Isn’t it his day off? He still owes me thirty quid, and he wasn’t around last week either.’

Roland massaged his temples pointedly. ‘Dunno. What’d you loan him money for anyway? You know he’s no good for it.’

‘He needed it for the train! He had some big appointment or date or something, I don’t know. He came by the record shop all in a lather, and I’ve got a bleeding heart. I don’t mind saying, he looked fucking ghastly, God only knows what that idiot has gotten himself into. Is Smitty coming? He usually knows where to find him.’

‘Not til later. He has a birthday party to go to first. I’ll keep an eye out, not that it’ll do you any good.’

‘All right, I get it. Cheers sunshine. Come on Laurie, I’ll get you a glass.’

They edged through the press to the mini-kitchen at the back of the room, through the dizzy tangle of flirting men. Laurie shook himself free of his surprise and discovered a ‘glass’ to be a choice between a tea-stained mug and a scrubbed-out jam jar. Tom pulled out a bottle of Ribena and diluted it with the vodka, presenting it to Laurie with an air of accomplishment.

‘Here you go! Hello, what’s the matter?’

‘Sorry—I just didn’t realise there was much of a gay community here. I haven’t been to a real party since I left uni.’

‘We’re refugees, us!’ Tom agreed over the noise. ‘Of course, it gets fucking incestuous. You don’t know what a joy it is to meet someone new. Speaking of: Laurie, what’s that short for? I’ll tell you a secret but you mustn’t share: mine is short for Thomas.’

‘It isn’t short for anything.’ Laurie smirked conspiratorially over his drink. ‘It’s on my birth certificate. Laurie Elias Raynes.’

‘You’re kidding. _Laurie?_ It’s a bit, ehm, y’know, isn’t it?’ He flopped his wrist playfully. ‘Was your mum feeling prophetic or what?’

‘More a happy accident. My grandad named me. I think it was for a friend who died in the war, but he doesn’t like to talk about it.’

‘Friend or...’ Tom ribbed him playfully, and Laurie grimaced for effect.

‘Christ, no! Else he wouldn’t be my grandad, would he? He married my gran during the war.’

‘Don’t be naïve, silly, that doesn’t mean anything.’

Laurie grimaced. ‘I’d rather not think about my grandad that way, thanks. I’ll have to bleach my brain out now.’

‘No denying the facts of life, _Laurie_.’

‘Oh yes I fucking well can. He and my gran don’t even share a bedroom. I’m happy knowing that the stork brought them my mum, and so-on from there.’

Tom chortled so violently he began to choke. ‘They _what_? You fucking nobhead, what more evidence do you need? I can’t believe you’re named for your grandad’s gay lover, that is fucking aces.’

‘As you like, you mad bastard.’

‘See? You’re already getting the hang of things. Just agree with everything I say and I’ll love you forever.’ Tom winked and led him to an unclaimed spot on the floor and settled cross-legged agaist the wall. ‘So obviously you’ve been at uni, but I don’t remember you from before that, and I’m sure I’d remember someone as pretty as you. Did you have some kind of magical skin condition that made you completely invisible or what?’

‘I commuted to a school for Friends.’ He thought he spotted a lone, glittering pair of women sitting delicately on the couch, until one gesticulated to emphasize a point and he realised they were both men.

‘Sorry? For friends? What if you had a falling-out, did they not let you graduate?’

‘No, Friends—Quakers.’

‘Oh! Did you have a uniform?’

Laurie was arrested by the sight of one man shoving another playfully into the last available bit of wall and hitching his knee so far up that the other was lifted, laughing hysterically, onto his toes. ‘Sorry?’

‘Did you have a uniform, I said. Do you _still_ have it? More to the point, would you still fit in it if you did?’ From there the conversation charged ahead into Tom’s fantasies of schoolboy romance, and meandered on to everything from lengthy, salacious biographies of everyone in the room to Tom’s very decided opinions on the best part of licorice allsorts. Whenever Laurie’s jam jar was discovered to be empty Tom staggered up and made the short, treacherous journey across the tangle of guests and refilled it with, Laurie quickly deduced, whatever he grabbed first in whatever combination his hands fell upon. During Tom’s fifth trip Laurie blundered off to find the toilet and was forced to conclude that he was more drunk than he’d meant to be when he found the latch on the door too confusing to manage for a full minute, and was stymied again on his way out in his quest to get it open again. He felt as though the full room had been painted in bold, bright strokes, and something in him collapsed outward like a puzzle box. He paused in the doorway and watched Tom’s dark smudge from across the room, his arms cascading about in swooping lines as he explained something to the laughing man next to him.

As he picked his way back Laurie sluggishly scanned the room and saw Roland in the same stuffed chair as before, but with the addition of a small sandy-haired lad attached enthusiastically to his face. He was too drunk to realise he was staring until Tom returned and made a loud clucking noise near Laurie’s ear.

‘Oo, that’s what he gets for being judgmental! He’ll regret it in the morning. James is so fucking needy, he’s absolutely insane. It’ll be weeks before Rollo gets shot of him.’

‘A terrible fate, I’m sure.’

Tom sighed. ‘No, you’re right. James is a proper handful but at least he’s a regular source of sex. Here you are.’ He handed Laurie the jar, this time looking suspiciously like it might contain straight vodka, dyed just faintly purple by the residue of his past five drinks. When he saw Laurie eyeing it Tom added regretfully, ‘We’re out of squash.’

‘Too bad. I thought it added a certain je ne sais qoi.’

‘Shut up!’ Tom smacked his arm happily. ‘I didn’t know you required your juice fresh-pressed by the feet of angels.’

‘What time is it anyway? Wasn’t there something about the pub?’

‘Eh—oops, it’s nearly midnight. I’m sorry, do you need to report in to Sergeant Grandmam? I can call a cab.’

‘I told her I was taking tomorrow off. I haven’t had a single day to myself since I came home, it seemed like a fair thing to ask. Figured I’d be hung-over. Anyway, we don’t share a house so I can stumble home whenever. My mum wouldn’t wake if I came home trailing a pipe and drum corp.’ He took a searing drink and concluded, ‘And my step-dad has got the personality of a Biro, so. He’ll probably just...’ Laurie arranged his face into a puckered caricature of dead-eyed disapproval, puffing out his cheeks so that Tom, when he’d recovered control from laughing, slapped them flat with a loud fart of air.

‘Fabulous! Then you’ll be here for the part where Douglas gets down to his pants and starts singing the greatest hits of Madonna, Kenny remembers he’s got a night shift starting in an hour and starts staggering around and moaning like a wounded dog, Mac’s wife calls wanting to know where he is, and Roland realises it’s James he’s got attached to his stupid gob and tries not to howl with regret.’

Laurie processed the only thing he could. ‘Is that something that happens to him often?’

‘Frankly if you asked James he’d probably tell you Rollo is his boyfriend. Mind you it’d be hard to argue with him, as long as you don’t define boyfriends as people who like each other at least a little bit.’ Tom took a long sip of his drink, his eyebrows indicating that he didn’t have very strong feelings one way or the other. ‘You had a boyfriend before?’

Laurie stalled and settled himself more comfortably into the corner; he was drunk enough that it felt oddly comfortable and safe. ‘Only one that lasted more than a few weeks. In my second year at uni. We were together almost a year.’

‘What happened?’

‘With Craig?’ Laurie hesitated, and through his intoxication pierced a certain keen awareness that a year of his short life and a man he had loved could be summarised in so little. That with modest explanation he could dispose of the nights since when he worried that he’d irreparably lost a future he might have had, a gentler life that they had mutually reasoned away in a first, mangled attempt at adult rationality and responsibility. How now when he found himself at the same junction between learning and doing he was paralysed by the fear of all the pieces he might agree to tear from himself if he stepped forward into any single future.

Laurie shrugged. ‘He graduated and left to do his postgrad back in Scotland. Neither of us fancied doing things long-distance, so.’

‘Was he fit?’

‘Not like you.’ Tom giggled agreeably, and Laurie rolled his head against the wall to get a better look at him. ‘He was sort of...gangly and ginger. Very sweet, though. Anyway, that was ages ago. What about you?’

‘Oh, not me, darling.’ Tom’s free hand fluttered in dismissal, heavy with drink. ‘No one could keep up.’

‘—Is that a challenge?’

Tom’s look of surprise was quickly swallowed up in the quicksands of an assessing leer, angled incrementally into the corona of Laurie’s body heat. ‘Is that a purely academic question?’

In answer, Laurie tossed back the last of his drink and let the jar roll away into the copse of trousers. The earth seemed to tip him forward obligingly, and in the same motion Laurie pulled Tom up into his lap and leant back into the corner. Tom splashed half his mug down the front of Laurie’s jumper and disposed of the rest in one clean swallow. In the next breath he kissed Laurie fiercely, so that his head ground into the brick, grit flaking down his hair and neck. Tom’s tongue was feverishly hot and sour with vodka and his knee dug painfully into Laurie’s thigh, and in their corner of the chaos Laurie clutched him close and closer.

******

He woke up sharply the next morning, reeled in by a jagged hacking he sluggishly identified as coughing. He flung out an arm into the shocking cold of the air outside the duvet and rubbed the exposed knobs of Tom’s back, not so much knowing if it helped as saying that he wished he could. Eventually the coughs burned themselves out and Tom wheezed out his thanks, gasping experimentally a few times before he burrowed back down under the duvet and into Laurie’s arms.

‘Mm, morning. Sorry to wake you like that. It’s always so fucking cold in here in the morning and it sets off my asthma. Sexy eh?’

‘Sucks to your ass-mar,’ Laurie agreed sleepily, and Tom swatted his shoulder and yawned into the dip of Laurie’s neck.

‘It’s that damn ‘flu that got it started. It’s turned me into some kind of fucking consumptive maiden, you know, ‘scuse me while I cough up blood on my handkerchief darling. Any minute now the Beeb are going to stick me in a dress and have me followed round by a camera crew and pining men in cravats.’ He thumped his chest, a contemplative look settling in on his face. ‘On second thought, that sounds fabulous. Well, it’s something to look forward to. Christ, but I’m starving!’

Laurie cast his mind back, feeling drowned and disoriented under the sudden deluge of energy onto the flat parched planes of his life. ‘I don’t think we had any dinner.’

Tom grunted and poked at a surprisingly livid bruise over his hip bone with an absent air of conquest. ‘I hate to disappoint you, but I don’t think there’s a single thing to eat here.’

‘I should get home anyway. If you walk with me partway we could grab something.’

‘Oo, I’ll grab something all right!’ Tom wiggled against him, then abruptly rolled out from under the blankets and tottered over to his closet to contemplate its contents. ‘Tragically, darling, I’m due in at the records shop in a half hour. Hey, if you’ve got the day off you should stop by and keep me company later. It’s fucking barren til the schools let out.’

‘Yeah, ok.’ Laurie lay back on the bed and shimmied into his jeans and squinted around the small, dim room. ‘Have you seen my shirt?’

‘Look up,’ Tom giggled, and Laurie pitched himself unsteadily to his feet to retrieve his shirt from where it was caught at the top of the blinds. He bent to recover his jumper from the floor, and when he straightened he found Tom crowded into his space, breathing warm gusts of air up at him through an open smile. ‘Thanks for a lovely night. Think you’d like to do it again some time?’

‘Suppose I could,’ Laurie smiled, and kissed him softly. He might have made it more but Tom hopped back, laughing something about morning breath, and retreated into the ensuite toilet while Laurie wrangled his arms through the stiff and uncooperative jumper.

In the front they found Roland back in the puffed chair as if he’d never left, but he was dressed now in loose-fitting pyjamas and glowering resignedly over his tea at the kitchenette, where James clattered happily through the cabinets as it the force of his desire might make breakfast magically appear. ‘Alright, Tommy!’ he called over a shoulder. ‘And who’s this?’

Tom herded him unsubtly towards the door, grinning sadistically at Roland. ‘This is Laurie. You may have noticed he’s divine and I will be accepting my medal for finding him whenever convenient. You’re all welcome.’

‘Oo, but it seems like you’re keeping him for yourself,’ James cooed, gesticulating dangerously with a kitchen knife of mysterious purpose. ‘You only monopolised him all night, you naughty boy.’

‘Now, now, you’ll make Rollo jealous,’ Tom sang, waving wickedly at Roland as he pushed Laurie over the threshold. ‘Bye bye! Have a lovely morning, you two! What a fucking twat,’ he added, once they were safe on the other side.

They stopped in at a bakery were Tom once again knew the owner and had an animated gossip about a mutual neighbour they seemed to suspect had knocked over a nearby road sign, extrapolating dire predictions for the boy’s future as a possible arch-criminal. Back on the street, where the sun had made an improbable appearance, Tom began, ‘I went to school with his daughter Jenny,’ and filled the remainder of the walk with glorified reports of their antics at school and speculation about how things might have been if Laurie had gone with them, which seemed to largely consist of all the places Tom thought they might have fooled around.

‘Jenny and I went down to Brighton over the summer with some mates, you know, Rollo and Dougie and Greg and all,’ Tom confided cheerfully, as they waited out the last ten minutes before his shift started sitting close together on the kerb in front of the shop, picking crumbs from the paper bakery bag. ‘Have you ever been? Well, then it really is my duty to take you some time. Christ but there are some fit blokes. There was this older gent, he looked like, ehm, what’s his name...’

‘Thomas Chapman!’ A middle aged, pock-faced man with thinning overlong hair leant out the door to the records shop. ‘Quit making a ruddy spectacle of yourself and get your arse in here. I don’t pay you to flirt.’

Tom leapt up obediently, unmollified, and ruffled Laurie’s hair. ‘See you later, darling?’ When Laurie nodded he beamed and blew a messy kiss before disappearing from sight behind the thicket of posters.

Laurie watched the shop window for a long time anyway, then dusted himself off and turned toward home.

***********

When he had showered and changed, Laurie was overcome with a sudden energy and resolve and he picked through the pile of books he had exiled to the back of his room when he came home from university. He piled his choice together with a student dictionary and a half-filled notebook and thundered back down to spread his things out on the table, and pulled up short when he saw that his grandfather had materialised in the kitchen, gently sorting out three table settings at the dinette.

‘Laurie,’ Andrew said, smiling over his shoulder, no doubt warned of Laurie’s approach by the ruckus on the stairs. ‘Your mother ran out on an errand. I was just about to fix myself a sandwich. Would you like one?’

‘Yes,’ Laurie said after a surprised moment. ‘Thank you, I’m famished.’

Andrew was quiet as he set out everything he needed in a neat line on the countertop, and waited until Laurie had settled himself cautiously in one of the small chairs glance over his shoulder again. ‘Surprised your grandmother let us have the same day off? Between you and me, I think she wanted some time to herself for a change.’

‘The hospital isn’t exactly an ideal place for it,’ Laurie replied, skeptical.

Andrew spooned tea into the kettle thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps. There are different ways to be alone.’

‘I suppose.’ Laurie thought of Tom, tucked into a corner with him in a room tight with bodies and noise.

‘Did you have a good time last night? I’m glad to hear you’re making friends.’ It was a moment before the question settled into Laurie’s reverie, and he startled and glanced up from his empty plate in alarm, only to find his grandfather still calmly sorting through the pantry.

‘I, uh, yes. I forgot money for a cab, so they, you know, let me kip on the couch. I hope I didn’t worry anyone.’

He thought he caught his grandfather smiling, but his head was angled too far to tell. ‘Whether or not you stay, you should build your own life while you’re here, Laurie. That includes friends.’ He handed Laurie a sandwich and sat down next to him.

‘I don’t think,’ Laurie began, and then bit into the sandwich to stall and work himself into a joking tone. ‘I don’t think the life I’d build for myself would necessarily be, uh, exemplary. It’s probably better for everyone that I don’t have much chance to get out, what with the hospital devouring all of my time.’ He fell into a sardonic half-smile easily, but found he couldn’t hold it under his grandfather’s open look.

‘Laurie, the Lord didn’t make this world to punish you. You give thanks to Him by loving yourself and others.’ He paused while he poured out the tea. ‘On that note, remember you don’t need to stay at the hospital if you find something that suits you better. Even if it’s also volunteer. You should go where you feel you can do the most good.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘Or at least somewhere you don’t so obviously dislike. Tutoring, for example,’ he said over Laurie’s awkward attempts to assure him otherwise, tapping at the cover of his book. ‘What are you reading, then?’

‘Oh, uh, I mean, I wish I could say I was reading it. More like stumbling. Or butchering.’ Laurie rubbed his brow awkwardly, grateful for the escape. ‘I just thought I should keep my Greek and Latin fresh, so if I do apply to a postgrad programme I’m not a complete disaster when I get there. I forgot my ancient Greek was already a disaster.’

Andrew took the book gently and flipped through the middle, smiling at the Atlantean curves of the Greek letters. ‘Makes even less sense to me,’ he laughed, and then turned it to the cover. ‘Arrian? Unfortunate name. _The Anabasis of Alexander- a new critical edition_...by L. P. Odell.’

Laurie charged easily into the short pause, back on the familiar footing of self-deprecation. ‘Odell’s a good editor, but God Himself could make the editorial apparatus and it wouldn’t help if I don’t advance my vocabulary beyond that of an ancient toddler.’

‘Nottingham,’ Andrew said vaguely, scanning the first page.

Laurie glanced up from his tea. ‘What? Oh, right. Dr Odell teaches there. Taught? I’m not very familiar with his work, honestly. They have a pretty good Classics department at Nottingham, though. Worth considering if I decide to go back for my doctorate, assuming anyone will have me.’

‘They should be so lucky,’ he replied firmly, and caught Laurie’s eyes with a sudden seriousness. After a long moment, Andrew turned back to his tea and said, ‘So tell me about this _Anabasis of Alexander_ , then.’

**********

For the next two weeks Laurie was only able to stop by the records shop for short periods in the afternoon, before teenagers in loose ties and untucked shirts crashed in and Tom’s boss chased Laurie out. Laurie found he didn’t mind being treated like a mongrel stray, because the man didn’t seem to care if Tom followed Laurie into the tiny staff toilet. From the way he told it Tom seemed willing to have sex in a garbage skip but the cubicle was too disgusting even for his dismal standards; but he did let Laurie push him up against the wall and kiss him until their jaws ached and the manager kicked the door and shouted something about filthy cocksuckers. The next time Laurie stopped by at closing, Tom was halfway across the floor and sweeping his arms in a grand shooing motion before Laurie had half a foot in. ‘Out, out, out’ he said, unnecessarily. ‘Come on, shift.’

Laurie felt his cheekbones streak red. ‘Sorry. Is this a bad time?’

‘If you mean it’s a time that’s bad, then yes. If you mean I’ve no time to see you, never, darling. You’re coming with me if I have any say about it.’ He caught Laurie by the elbow on his way out and carried him up the street on the tide of his fretful energy.

‘No need to drag me, Tom, I’m coming. Where to, then?’

Tom ground to a twitching halt in the middle of the pavement, jaw clenched around a horrible thought. Finally: ‘We’re having an Irish wake.’ He pulled Laurie stumbling after him in a thick silence until they came to a basement pub not far from his flat. Roland and Tom’s third flatmate Douglas were already there, sat at a large, half-filled corner table. James clung to Roland’s arm, sniffing intermittently between messy quaffs, and Roland looked too drunk already to notice the stains splashed along the arm of his shirt. Laurie fetched them drinks while Tom made his way around the table, distributing one-armed hugs and murmurs.

He pulled out two of the empty chairs as Laurie returned, and took a long pull of his pint before he finally collapsed back, head lolling, and met Laurie’s eyes. ‘It was Greg. The bastard up and died yesterday. And that mother of his didn’t even tell his friends. We only found out ‘cos Douglas went by to return a record and she slammed the door in his fucking face.’

‘Shit, I’m sorry. What happened? Do you know?’

‘Pneumonia! Of all the fucking things. As if this were the bloody middle ages.’ Laurie turned to him slowly, brow furrowed with a dangerous question. ‘Fucking hell, Laurie! Of course not.’ Tom drew a fretful line on the table in a splash of lager. ‘I didn’t ask, did I. But not round here. We’re not exactly a bleeding metropolis, in case you hadn’t cottoned on to that yet.’

‘Tommy,’ Laurie interjected warningly, but Tom overrode him with a grand air of finality: ‘No, Greg just couldn’t take any kind of fucking care of himself. He’s had the old factory cough since he was only little, and even after they let him go it never wore off. He tried to survive on whisky and air and look where that got him.’ He pointed an emphatic finger in Laurie’s face. ‘I don’t understand this obsession with looking like a fucking skeleton on wheels, I really don’t.’

‘Only because you don’t have to work for it,’ Laurie returned dryly, faint with relief. ‘You might understand if you had to put the least effort into looking like king of the bloody fairies.’ He plucked emphatically at Tom’s delicate wrists, so that they rose and fell in a delicate arc back to the table, like a lace handkerchief.

‘You take that back, Laurie Raynes. At least give me some credit for the effort I put into finding clothes that show off my girlish figure.’ He preened sarcastically, ducking half into his gigantic leather coat and batting his eyelashes over the collar. ‘Vogue, darling, vogue. Hey look, there’s Jenny. Jenny! Darling, come here, isn’t it awful? Hey, do you remember that lad I was telling you about, the really gorgeous one? Meet Laurie, Jenny.’ The night passed in a surreal carnival of tight laughter; Laurie felt strangely as through the floor beneath his chair was too soft, as though they were all being pulled into a sucking chest wound. Much later he was surprised to come up for oxygen just long enough to find himself tangled mostly naked in Tom’s pilly, rough duvet, Tom laughing under him as he tried to work Laurie free from his pants.

‘Where are the condoms?’ Laurie gasped out, and Tom gave him a daft smile, two hectic spots of colour softening his narrow face.

‘Christsakes Laurie! Pocket of my jacket, which is—oh, chair out front? With Rollo and _James_? You really want to interrupt things to go get them or shall I?’ He pulled hard at Laurie’s cock and grinned at his response. ‘So I take it you’re not volunteering to go either? Oh well.’ He made as if to dive down head-first into Laurie’s lap, but Laurie grabbed him by the shoulders before he was halfway there and hauled him up into his arms, collapsing back into the pillows.

‘Outdoor sports only then,’ Laurie declared, philosophically, taking them both into his hand firmly enough that Tom finally stopped struggling and collapsed onto him.

‘I don’t know how you imagined I was trying to top you with my mouth,’ Tom gasped. ‘You really need to— _aah_. You win, you win, just like that, darling, _God_.’ Laurie pushed the first fingers of his free hand into Tom’s mouth but it did little to quiet him, and he murmured sloppy incoherence around Laurie’s fingers as he sucked and bit at them. Laurie closed his eyes and felt for the bright pinwheels of color that spun somewhere in the back of his mind, faster and faster, until he could feel the colors spreading through his skin and bones and breaking out in a long red and purple moan and a warm, juddering splash across his stomach. A bright fog of contentment saturated the air around him and he pulled at Tom until he bit down hard on Laurie’s knuckles, shook, and collapsed. He was asleep almost before Laurie pulled his fingers free, and this time it was Laurie who followed close behind.

**********

Laurie and Tom slept through the morning and climbed to wakefulness in tiny increments, sleepily rubbing warmth into each other’s skin and nosing their hair and murmuring nonsense plans and complaints about their heads, but without any real intention to get up and do something about it. Laurie only began to wonder how late it might be and if someone would be missing him when he registered the distant ringing of the flat’s only phone. ‘Oi Tommy, phone’s for you,’ Douglas shouted sourly from the kitchen.

Tom flopped back onto the pillows in a baroque sprawl and bellowed, ‘Can’t it wait? Tell them I’ll ring back!’

‘It’s the hospital,’ he called back. ‘Says they just want to tell you the result of your blood panels.’

‘Ugh, coming!’ Tom rolled his eyes dramatically and flung himself to his feet, shuffling into his boxers and vest as he went. ‘They’ll just want to tell me again that my iron’s off and don’t I eat properly,’ he groused to Laurie. ‘It’s every bloody time.’

‘Maybe it’s a sign you ought to eat your veg,’ Laurie suggested mildly, and settled into the duvet.

Tom snorted, hand on the doorknob. ‘Waste money on fresh veg when there’s lager to be had? Not while I’m young and hot, I fucking well won’t. Be right back, Laurie. I’ll get us some tea while I’m at it, make the trip worthwhile.’

‘One sugar, bit of cream,’ Laurie called after him, smiling. ‘Oh, and maybe grab your jacket while you’re there?’

‘Oo, I’ll give you sugar and cream, all right!’ Tom wiggled his arse for emphasis and then pulled the door shut behind him, leaving Laurie alone but surprisingly comfortable.

He tried to convince himself to get up and dressed, but his mind felt open and intelligent for the first time in weeks and he collapsed into his thoughts instead. Sometimes when he was translating he still came across a word he couldn’t remember, some obscure thing or mediæval creation or hapax logomenon. If he didn’t have his dictionaries to hand then he often found that it percolated somewhere in the back of his mind, so that hours or days later the answer appeared so suddenly that he had no idea why he was even thinking of it. Pop culture was just as bad; during their relationship he’d spent a truly disturbing amount of time working through the names of pop songs Craig had been aimlessly humming weeks earlier. It worried him slightly to think that while he was trying to work through real problems his mind was dedicating whole swathes of mental real estate to remembering insubstantial details, that maybe half his mental fatigue was the result of his bone-deep inability to prioritise.

As he watched the door, wondering if maybe Tom’d had to wash some dishes before he could make tea, or if he’d decided to fry up some breakfast, he suddenly surfaced at a place so clear and bright and awful that he didn’t realise he’d sat up til his feet hit the floor and he needed to brace his knees just short of falling down.

He had just thirty seconds to be dimly grateful that Tom’s bedroom was ensuite. Time went strange and endless until he was finally done vomiting into the toilet, but as he rocked back into his heels, gasping and heaving, he made himself try to guess. Fifteen minutes? Twenty? Tom still wasn’t back.

God, he was a coward. He forced himself to stand.

He found Tom sitting on the small island of linoleum with Douglas, hugging the telephone receiver absently to his chest and staring at a stain on the sofa, muttering, ‘I don’t remember that. Did that happen at the party on Friday? The bastards.’ He seemed to notice Laurie hovering a few feet away very suddenly, and his face broke into an eerie smile. ‘Hi Laurie. Sorry I haven’t got started on the tea yet. Would you mind if I tagged along to the hospital today? They wanted to run a couple more tests. And Laurie.’ His knuckles whitened on the receiver. ‘I’m really sorry. The nurse said you should probably come in, too.’

*********

Laurie shut the kitchen tap over the tall glass in his hand, and surfaced from his groggy routine long enough to squint around the dimness of the flat. Several of his books in Greek and Latin weighed down a pile of post, and an application booklet mingled messily with the pages of one of Douglas’s rag mags. A quilt he’d brought over from his old bedroom was splashed over half the sofa and trailed on the mangy carpet. For the first time in as long as he’d known them, Roland and Douglas had honestly taken their Friday night party to the pub, because Laurie had come back from his job the night before and found Tom curled up under the quilt, shivering in time to the faint radio crackle behind the endless nattering of the news report. He hadn’t meant to move in, but somewhere along the way he had slotted himself in to a space he hadn’t even known existed four months prior.

His eyes flicked to the wall clock. He still had an hour but he couldn’t afford to be late; his grandmother had tolerated a certain small flexibility in the hours he put towards volunteering, but since she’d found him a handful of shifts as an orderly he had other administrators to answer to, people who wouldn’t keep him on for sheer nepotism. Since Tom had been let go from the records shop job, they needed the money. His thoughts caught on the idea of a they, almost amused that something so small, a mere tic of grammar, could encompass a shift so big.

Laurie lumbered back to the bedroom and stared in drowsy surprise at the empty blankets, at a loss until he caught the retching echoes carry through the thin plywood door to the toilet. He knocked but didn’t wait for an answer he knew he wouldn’t get, and in the same motion knelt close behind Tom and placed the glass of water on the tile within reach. As he carded his fingers through Tom’s hair Laurie inspected the hard unsurprised place in his mind that was already distantly calculating the adjustments they would need to make to their morning. ‘Meds upsetting your stomach again?’ he asked softly, when Tom had quieted for a full minute.

‘Mm.’ He nodded against the bowl, skull scratching out a soft sound against the porcelain. ‘Suppose you’re here to give me more though. Should have warned me,’ he paused roughly, and managed to keep his stomach, ‘you have such weird kinks.’ He coughed and spat into the toilet. ‘I’m sorry. Give me a minute to make sure that’s the last of it.’

Rather than answer, Laurie kissed his shoulder softly and cast his mind back for a distraction. ‘...You know I’ve always had a ridiculously weak stomach, especially when I’m under a lot of pressure,’ Laurie whispered into Tom’s damp hair, ‘and my second year at uni I had an awful time adjusting to the workload, and crew, and all the socs I’d joined in my first year. I was such a silly bastard, I was completely convinced the world would fall apart if I didn’t contribute my, you know, impassioned nodding to every social justice cause in the universe. My stomach was in high revolt for months before I came to my senses. Anyway, Craig used to sing me to sleep in Gaelic of all things. I asked him finally what one of the songs was about and he admitted he’d no idea. Apparently he learnt them off his grandmother and for all he knew it was a list of her favourite foods.’

Tom snickered obligingly, the sound echoing weirdly off the tile. ‘Seems unlikely. You’d’ve caught on if he were just repeating the words for porridge oats, potatoes and whisky.’

‘It did seem suspiciously long,’ Laurie agreed.

Tom giggled and shuffled Laurie back, testing his weight from a cautious kneel before nodding once. ‘All right,’ he said, and Laurie unfolded himself carefully from the floor and helped Tom up after. They watched each other in the mirror as they cleaned their teeth, Tom still fine-featured and almost pretty under the shadows and pallor painted in random streaks across his skin. Together they tottered out to the couch, where Laurie tucked the quilt around his knees and Tom obediently took the next round of medication with porridge and accepted the teacup Laurie had tapped out his lunch doses into, a strange lumpy drink of particoloured pills. Before he could fetch the television remote, though, Tom toppled Laurie into his lap, and he carefully rolled into Tom’s hands and held himself above Tom by his elbows. They kissed until Laurie’s arms began to burn, until he felt heat begin to gather in his groin and he eased himself away before it could go any further. When they had time and energy they would bring each other off with their hands, but not before Laurie went to work at the hospital; Tom’s doctors had said they couldn’t spread it by touch but he had said it with such a look of uncertain disgust that they retained a deep burn of fear. Small as Tom was, he felt heavier these days with the weight of worry and responsibility. Laurie left after eliciting another unconvincing promise that he would someone for help if he needed it, even if it came down to calling Laurie’s grandmother to pass on a message.

On his lunch Laurie’s grandmother ceded her office to him for a short phone call, sailing out on a wind of watchful purpose. He twisted himself nervously into the springy cord as he dialed, and just when it nearly rang out, as it had on his previous three attempts over the week, the line connected with a yawning ‘Hullo?’

‘Hi...is Craig there?’

‘...Laurie? It’s you, isn’t it? Vic said you’d called and I thought she’d got the name wrong. I can’t believe it!’ For just a moment, he closed his eyes and let the deep tide of Craig’s voice take him, a fierce riptide in the lingering consonants, the crumbling edges of the vowels. ‘Laurie? Lo? Sorry—it is you, right?’

‘It’s me,’ Laurie said, even as it occurred to him to wonder if that could be true. He rolled a pill bottle back and forth across the desk and saw suddenly the boy who’d loved big, gentle, easy Craig—Craig as distant and self-sustaining as the hills, and knew for the first time that something in him was dying with Tom. ‘How are you, Craig?’

‘Oh, you know, same as ever. Eh, cut my hair so I don’t look like a great poisonous mushroom anymore.’

‘That must have made the papers as a local tragedy.’

‘Aye it did, and who can blame them? There’s naught else of note up here. My good looks were practically the only thing keeping half the population from leaping off Arthur’s Seat for pure boredom.’

‘Always knew you were a bit evil.’

‘I must be. Can’t imagine why else someone as wicked as yourself would ever have associated with my like.’

‘Well, it was your good looks, obviously. Of course, with those compromised I might have to reconsider this phone call.’ Laurie twisted the cord round his finger. ‘Hey, so how’s the degree coming along? I’m applying to Edinburgh and I’d really appreciate your opinions on the programme.’

‘It’s a fabulous department. I can’t tell you much about the doctoral track, though. I pitched it in after my MA. I’m finishing up my teaching certificate now.’

‘You what? What possessed you to do that?’

‘Stuff’s two thousand years old, Lo. What are the odds I’ve got something new to say about it? I’m no brilliant like you, and the schools here, they’re in a bad way. There’s more for me to do there.’ Laurie could hear in his voice that he believed himself, and he could clearly see Craig in his mind’s eye, walking past the city’s schools every day and slowly inoculating himself with the belief that his genius was ordinary.

‘You are brilliant, though,’ Laurie insisted, although he knew the compliment would never penetrate the unassailable walls of Craig’s generosity, and with resignation he heard Craig laugh easily.

‘Aye well, it isn’t as though they’ve banned me from thinking about it! Who knows?’ Laurie could hear him rummaging through a drawer on the other end. ‘Warning! Warning!’ he rumbled in the voice of police megaphone. ‘You have only been licensed to think about past contrary-to-fact conditional conjugations. Desist your authorship theories immediately or face extermination!’

‘I’d be careful. Once you’ve got a job, if Thatcher catches you wasting a single minute of the state’s money on authorship theories she’ll have your legs broken and your eyes put out.’

‘And such lovely eyes they are, alas,’ Craig agreed ironically. ‘Suppose there’s nothing for it but to dedicate my life to basic grammar. Hey, not that I’m complaining, but did you need to know something in particular?’

‘Um, actually, I need to know if there’s a way I can go for just one of the visitors’ days and see everyone I need to.’ He glared superstitiously around the room and added, ‘My boyfriend’s unwell and I was hoping to make it a quick trip.’

There was a pause as Craig flipped through his diary. ‘Are you looking at last year’s calendar? Visitors’ weekend isn’t for another month.’

‘No, look.’ Laurie squeezed his eyes tight. ‘He’s sick, Craig. It’ll only be worse in a month. Or, well—I can’t really guess, it’s just. There are a lot of medications to keep track of and if I leave his useless flatmates in charge he’ll miss them. And—anyway, you understand, don’t you?’ He waited through a long thick silence, fear and, to his horror, embarrassment trickling down to the pit of his stomach. ‘Craig? Are you still there?’

‘Oh, Lo. I’m so sorry. Are you—are you all right?’

‘Please, I’d hardly waste my time on these bloody applications if I were unwell. You’d have to unglue me from a pleasure cruise.’

‘Right. You couldn’t turn that brain of yours off. Pirates could be pushing you off a gangplank and you’d be calmly holding forth about conceptions of Platonic love in Antique saints vitae.’ Craig riffled through some noisy papers on the other end, and Laurie wondered if Craig meant to give him time to even out his breathing; he found, or pretended to find, whatever he was looking for soon after Laurie managed to bring himself under control. ‘Look, I can do you one better. Who knows why, but Dr Allport has sort of adopted me as a friend. I’ll ask if he can spare you time for a phone interview. He ought to. That way, if you need still to visit, you can work it out with him, but I think you might manage to get it all done over the phone.’

‘You’re brilliant, Craig. Thank you.’

‘It’s literally the least I can do. And hey, if you do need to come up, let me know. I can pick you up from the station. And you’re welcome to kip with me. Vic’s parents gave her the most outrageously comfortable sofa. It’s deadly, I can’t get a single bit of work done on it, it’s the furnishing equivalent of a swift kick to the head.’

‘Don’t tempt me,’ Laurie sighed unthinkingly. ‘I honestly can’t remember the last time I had a decent night’s sleep.’

‘Laurie,’ Craig began, his voice stretched thin, a familiar brogue carefully picking its way across the unfamiliar edges of Laurie’s name until it trailed off into a defeated sound. ‘Never mind. Look, I know it’s been a long time since we did more than exchange the odd Christmas card, but if you need someone to talk to.’ Laurie could just make out the sweaty plastic protest of Craig’s fingers knuckling the receiver tight. ‘Please.’

‘You still have my home number?’

Craig let a short, warm exhale of relief escape. ‘Yeah.’

‘Talk later then.’

‘Talk later, Lo. Take care.’

Laurie kept the receiver to his ear for a long breath after Craig rang off, as if willing the conversation into reverse, as if it could have been done any other way. From a long way off he discovered that his temple thumped so strongly that it pushed at the phone in nearly undetectable, steady quakes and became belatedly aware of his own headache. A helpless snigger shuddered through his face when he thought of the hundreds, thousands of paracetomol tablets he had passed out over the morning but hadn’t thought to take, the strange universe of which he had inadvertently become master—one where he was the center of a system where care orbited around him but to go through him was against the laws of his own physics.

Then he set the receiver quietly down and went back to work.

*********

At first, when Laurie shook them free of the dreck and detritus that the first thaw had surrendered to weeding, he didn’t understand what he was seeing. They were too horrible in their familiarity, but as he shuffled painfully under the holly and shrubbery at the back of the garden and gathered more a restless certainly burned through his bones. He was up and running to the back door before he even knew it; if he hadn’t known that someone else was home he might have kept running until he found someone, anyone, to erupt over, or he felt he could not survive his anger.

Inside Roland was sat in his usual chair, clawing over a paper half-unravelled over the floor and side table. Laurie drew a deep, furious breath, satisfied to see the startled look clamp down on Roland’s usually impassive stare. ‘Did you know he was doing this?’

Roland stared at the handful of pills, uncomprehending. ‘Doing what?’

‘I just collected these out of the back garden.’

Comprehension crawled its way across Roland’s face, and with it a horror and despair that Laurie was disgusted to find a relief. ‘Fuck you, of course I didn’t! Are you out of your bloody mind?’ Roland slammed the paper down on the table, and the sound went through Laurie’s head like a gunshot. ‘You know what though? I’m not surprised.’

Laurie shut his eyes briefly against the anger that was building behind his temples. ‘And you didn’t think to _say something_?’

‘I thought you were the new authority on all things Tom,’ Roland snapped nastily. ‘I assumed you’d know him well enough to check.’

‘I trusted him,’ Laurie said levelly. ‘I wouldn’t presume to undermine him if he didn’t give me a reason to. He’s an adult.’

‘Exactly, Raynes. He’s an adult. You can fuss all you like, but he can do whatever the hell he wants.’

Laurie felt himself loosing the battle against his ire. ‘I’m not the bloody Stasi, I’m only doing what his doctors said. This isn’t some arbitrary game I’ve made up just to be evil.’ A horrible warmth seemed to fill his bones, and he knew before he spoke that for the first time in his life he wanted to score another man’s heart with the kind of wound that never heals. ‘You only get to think that way because you’ve taken no responsibility for his care, not even his happiness.’

‘Well clearly you’ve been doing a real bang-up job.’ Roland’s face cracked into a rictus smile. ‘And you know what else? Doctors aren’t the law. Tom still gets a say.’

‘This isn’t a matter of opinion, Roland. It’s the only thing keeping him alive.’

‘Yeah, and what for?’ He seemed to fold in on himself. ‘There isn’t any cure coming. The best he could hope for is extra months, a year at the outside, and the pills made him feel awful. Assuming he could even get out of bed, assuming it’s a _good_ day, he can’t even go around his own neighborhood without everyone looking at him like he’s the fucking Satan. It’s no kind of life, Laurie. He’s dying, all right?’ He swiped tears from his face. ‘Get a bloody grip.’

‘Roland? I heard shouting,’ James called anxiously into the stunned silence, edging out of the darkened corridor with pupils blown wide. ‘Oh, love. Come here.’ He flicked his hands and Roland staggered into him with an audible _woof_ of air out the sides of his jacket, and though he tucked James under his chin it still seemed somehow that James though only little and ridiculous in his lavender robe was protecting him and could protect him.

********

Laurie retreated into an aimless, hours-long walk that somehow still concluded at his grandparents’ front steps. In the week since Tom had gone into the hospital Laurie had found himself there in what little extra time he had, unable to face either Douglas and Roland’s guilty resentment or his mother and step-father’s nervous tutting. Over the months of caring for Tom, his gran had begun to treat him with a respectful, approving contempt that was nearly comforting, and whatever her feelings on the matter she was hardly around. Just as Laurie had thought he would, his grandad Andrew answered the door when he knocked and ushered him through to the kitchen with his usual slow, thoughtful step.

‘Hello, Laurie. Your mother thought you might come by here. She left your post with me.’ He pressed a thick pile into Laurie’s hands, crowned with a redundant note in his mother’s handwriting that simply said _Laurie_.

When Laurie looked up again, his grandad had by some domestic magic produced two cups of tea and set them at the kitchenette. ‘Anything good?’

‘Just,’ Laurie picked listlessly through the edges, ‘materials from some of the programmes I’ve been accepted to.’

‘What’s the count up to now?’

‘Oh, um. Edinburgh. Exeter. Nottingham.’

‘Congratulations, Laurie.’ His voice was warm, and Laurie wondered if his grandfather knew he had unconsciously picked up Laurie’s frown, resigned and a little afraid. ‘I hadn’t heard the latest... Any idea what you might choose?’

Very suddenly Laurie realised that he was about to cry, and as quickly as he recognised it the danger passed, as if it were a thing too delicate to withstand his own observation. He almost regretted it. ‘I thought Nottingham, but—I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore.’

Surprise crossed Andrew’s face only briefly, and then with characteristic graciousness he seemed to change the subject. ‘I’ve missed having you around.’ He did not say it meanly, and looked genuinely contented—so much so that Laurie felt as though he had been shot in the stomach when he continued calmly, ‘How is your friend doing?’

‘Tom?’ Laurie stalled, pushing the packet of papers nervously to the side to make more room for his grandfather’s tea, as if to keep everything he’d touched at a respectful distance.

Andrew seemed to catch Laurie’s panic and settled into a pose of patient expectation on the other side of the table. ‘Tom,’ he agreed.

‘He,’ Laurie caught himself about to nervously shred the corner from the first page of a letter and forced himself to fold his hands in his lap. After a long moment of understanding, he asked on a sudden irrepressible impulse, ‘How did you do it? In the War.’ He glanced up and found his grandfather watching him seriously, tea forgotten. ‘Looking after people, when you knew there wasn’t any hope for them.’

‘Remember that all they’ve lost is this short life. That hope takes its purest form in the Lord, and that hope cannot be taken from anyone.’ Andrew smiled sadly and rested his hand on Laurie’s shoulder. ‘But I expect you’ve already told yourself that many times and found, like I did, that it feels very abstract in the face of pain, especially when you have dedicated yourself to easing suffering and find there is not always something you can do.’

‘I can’t even take the burden of a single man,’ Laurie told his knees, struggling to get the words out of the snarl of self-disgust that his face had twisted into.

‘I’d be surprised if you could.’ When Laurie’s eyes flashed up to make his defense, he found his grandfather looking at him with a soft, generous urgency. ‘It’s beyond any of us to take another man’s burden from him. But you can share it. And you have.’

‘From pure narcissism. I like to think he couldn’t have lived without me, but that’s nonsense. At least half of it was love of—a cause, of some abstract concept of love. And I don’t even know anymore what cause I thought it was.’

‘After Dunkirk,’ Andrew said after a long time, ‘I mopped floors for the survivors.’ He frowned in concentration. ‘When you find yourself in the middle of a war, Laurie, you will always find yourself asking why your love for God and your love for your fellow man seem to be at odds with one another. They aren’t, but you won’t see that until much later.’

‘I don’t,’ Laurie began, and hiccupped on uncertainty. ‘I’m not...’

Andrew drank his tea through the silence, and before Laurie could collect himself and register the non sequitur he began, ‘I met your grandmother when I transferred to the ambulance corps. She was a triage nurse at the field hospital where I was based. It was at the height of the Blitz and they kept trying to have her transferred somewhere out of the city, but she was adamant that she would stay where she was needed most. I’d never before known a woman more brave or more principled.’ He smiled faintly. ‘I was attracted to her conviction, I think. She was an anchor for my faith when I feared I might have lost it.’

‘Unfortunately,’ Laurie sniffed, almost laughing, ‘I don’t think she or anyone else would call Tom an anchor for my faith, exactly.’

Andrew’s mouth took on an amused twist. ‘I’m not sure your grandmother knows what to think. Regardless of what else is wrapped up in it, you are doing a good thing, Laurie.’

‘I’m not sure that I am,’ Laurie said, hunched into a cynical slouch. ‘I rather suspect I’ve been playing the hero for some very base reasons. It was never my calling, and I sincerely doubt a career in Classics would have made the world a better place.’

‘Your actions should always be guided by your principles,’ his grandfather said softly, ‘but you must always ask yourself whether you are hiding behind them. What you want and what you ought to do aren’t nearly as mutually exclusive as some would have you believe. Don’t let your beliefs make a coward of you.’

‘But what you did _was_ brave. The best I can do is be selfish.’

‘I went into the ambulance corps to prove a wasn’t a coward, Laurie.’ Andrew stared at a point just over Laurie’s shoulder, and when his eyes flicked back they were deep with a strange self-disgust. ‘Perhaps I did. Nevertheless. The need to prove your nobility is so often motivated by cowardice. The difference is that you rarely realise it until it’s too late to reverse the damage you’ve already done.’

********

A woman in a small red dress flung the door open, singing, ‘Hullo, hullo, come on in,’ but her smile faded quickly to a thoughtful frown. ‘Sorry, you must have the wrong—Hang on. I remember you. Aren’t you Laurie?’ She accepted his nod and continued in a great flutter of hands, ‘I’m sorry! We must have had the dates mixed up. Craig wasn’t expecting you until day after tomorrow. Um, here. Come in, I’m sorry for the fuss.’ The ‘fuss’ was a party in full swing, men and women Laurie’s age but impossibly happy. As the woman flicked a look over his shoulder to confirm that he was following, he placed her voice abruptly as Vic’s, some outer skin of professionalism shed to reveal a sharp, beautiful stranger. ‘We’re celebrating Craig getting his teaching certificate, not that the man of the hour had bothered to turn up yet. He’s probably held up helping the elderly cross the street and rescuing kittens from trees.’

‘Oh. Um. No, I’m sorry.’ Laurie froze in the foyer, clutching the strap of his bag. ‘Craig didn’t expect me today. I, ah, had to leave earlier than expected but I couldn’t get hold of him. I can get a hotel, please don’t let me interrupt you.’

‘Don’t be daft! He was so surprised to hear that you’d accepted and would be coming up. You really had it down to the wire, Craig and Dr Allport were convinced you weren’t going to take the offer.’

‘I wasn’t going to,’ he agreed absently, and hardly registered the surprised look she threw back at him; the entire room felt a very long way away, its sounds and movements slowed and muted by some great body of water. He heard himself say just as distantly, ‘My circumstances changed.’

‘Circumstances do,’ she agreed. ‘Here, you can chuck your things in Craig’s room. He’ll be over the bloody moon to see you’ve made it. It’ll make his night.’ She took his coat and tossed it carelessly on Craig’s bed, where it fell spread out like a placeholder .

‘Should I –?’ Laurie plucked helplessly at the hem of his tatty Oxford Crew jumper. When Vic started shaking her head and dragging out a high ‘Noooo, of course not!’ he sighed and dropped his bag to the carpet and clawed past the books and bottles on top of his change of clothes. ‘I’ll be right out,’ he said softly, and the next time he looked up Vic was gone and the door was closed. He braced both his palms on the edge of Craig’s mattress and let his face fall briefly between them, breathing slowly and steadily. His brain struggled to categorise the strange, familiar scent imprinted on the blankets, and felt as though time had tied itself into knots too tangled to distinguish, as if he were a creature with an endless present but no past or future.

In a quick motion he pulled a black woolen cardigan free of the bag switched it sharply out for the Crew jumper. He glanced in the mirror and saw his pale hair standing on end with static, but when it hardly responded to a few pats he found he didn’t much care. He knew that Craig would never notice and the satisfaction he felt at that was nearly malicious.

Outside, Vic dragged him in a nearly violent circuit of introductions, pressed a glass of unidentifiable red wine into his hands, and disappeared with a vow to figure out where Craig had gotten to. He could feel her watching him and smiling from her post at the telephone.

Tucked neatly at the edge of the press, Laurie began to feel overwhelmed and under-prepared. He polished off his second drink in a few swift swallows and, as it hit his empty stomach like a small explosive, suddenly realised that he hadn’t had anything to drink in months—nearly the entire year he’d been at home. He no longer had any sense of his own alcohol tolerance, which quite frankly had, like Tom’s, never been very good. Tom merely felt—had felt—that the loss of composure was not a consequence but a goal. Not like Craig; Craig could sit at the bar and nurse pint after pint, and the greatest injury to his dignity was that it made him sing, which he did anyway. Craig didn’t even mind the singing, because he had a clear, powerful tenor and a huge, infectious smile and his performances never ended as solos.

A cascading ruckus swept across the crowd from the door, and after some inspired maneouvring he saw that the man himself hovering half-out of his coat by the door, his hands bashfully sketching out an excuse in the air for an unimpressed Vic. Under the dimmed lights, Craig’s hair was lit like a bonfire. His posture was as awful as ever and when he spotted Laurie he uncoiled sharply, smiling so hugely Laurie could see all the way to his crooked back teeth. ‘You came!’ He opened his arms wide, and the strangers in between parted in a curious half-step, leaving Laurie space to stagger forward. Laurie tipped forward vertiginously, strangely shrunk when he folded into Craig’s arms and found that his nose barely cleared Craig’s shoulder.

He could feel Craig smile into his hair, and he tilted his head back—strange again—and submitted to Craig’s quiet inspection, happy and curious and concerned. ‘Christ, but I’ve missed you, Lo.’

‘I’ve missed you too,’ Laurie said, filled with a need greater than the truth, and kissed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Abiit ad plures; literally 'he has gone to the majority;' less literally 'he has joined the majority.' Figuratively, then, 'he has died.'

**Author's Note:**

> I was thinking about the use of the Phaedrus in Forster's Maurice, and then The Charioteer, and it got me to wondering what it would look like to do the same thing again, a generation or two forward. And that's this.


End file.
